The Wishing Garden (29 page)

It no longer mattered how many hubcaps he stole a night. He judged his worthiness now on how often he could make Emma Shaw laugh. The first time he’d kissed her, he’d also made his first wish.
Please, God
, he’d thought,
just don’t let her hate me
. He was not a fool. He wasn’t about to ask for more than that.

“So what do you think?” Rick was asking him. “You think she’ll do it?”

“What?”

Pippen kicked his shin. “Shit. You’ve got sex on the brain. You think your girlfriend will help stick up Bob
Simon’s liquor store? Simon’s never seen her before. By the time he realizes she’s in on it, we’ll have the safe cleared out. We’ll have the powder in our hands in less than a week.”

Eli tossed his cigarette on the ground. Sometimes, swear to God, he wished he was another person. He wished he’d been born into one of those soccer-crazy suburban families, that he’d been some kind of nerd and gone on to college to study chemistry. He wished Jack and Rick and Pippen weren’t his only friends in the world, that just one person expected more of him. Mostly, though, he didn’t wish for anything, because he knew for a fact he wouldn’t get it.

“I’ll ask her,” he said.

“Tell her, man. The girl’s hot for you. Tell her.”

That night, though, Emma kissed him so hard, he couldn’t say a word. She sat on his lap while he drove them to Sage Street, and it was all he could do just to stay away from cliffs and telephone poles. When they sneaked inside the garage apartment, he wanted to say something, but she was quicker.

“Thank God,” she said. “Thank God I met you.”

Oh, he was done for, all right.
Thank God I met you
. She might as well have locked him in some cave only she knew about, because from that moment on, he was all hers. He wasn’t going to lose control after all, he was going to give it up—hand himself over to her on a silver platter.
Thank God I met you
was the moment he realized how barren his life was, so he started living for her.

He didn’t say a single word, just unbuttoned her shirt. He buried his head in her breast. She held onto his hair and hummed deeply. Even her breathing sounded like music, and though the guys would be furious if he didn’t get her in on their plan tonight, he wasn’t about to ruin this. No girl had ever come to him
before. No girl had ever, really, wanted him. If he spoke, she just might change her mind. Better just to keep kissing her for the rest of his life.

Jake couldn’t sleep. At midnight, he walked to his bench and worked on a chair ordered by a country singer in Nashville. Doug’s bench sat in the corner, nearly finished, if Doug could only decide on the final carvings. Jake had never put so much time into a piece, and after this, he never would again.

He picked up a dozen strands of willow and twisted them into a chair arm. Rufus, the only dog who hadn’t deserted him for the warmth of Savannah’s feet, sat up abruptly, his hair on end. Jake reached over and calmed him. He knew what the dog had heard; it had been the same for seven nights running. Emma waited until she thought they all were asleep, then she sneaked out the front door of the cabin, her breath held in a tight ball in her chest. She wore no shoes, made no sound, and had no idea anticipation had an echo all its own, one that resounded like trumpet blasts in a lonely man’s heart. Jake couldn’t sleep for listening to it, and wanting exactly what she had.

He walked to the door and spied her running by, wearing jeans and a thin T-shirt. She saw him and stopped in her tracks. Her face was pale as moonlight, and she looked ready to cry.

“Come on in,” he said, then turned around without waiting to see if she would follow. She took her time. He had already added another two strands of willow by the time she sat down on her grandfather’s bench.

He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t look at her without thinking that love at her age was like bad cocaine. She thought it made her more beautiful and witty, but
she was delusional. She was actually strung out and a little bit frightening; she was quickly becoming someone only other addicts could like.

“Believe it or not,” Jake said, “love’s not always good for you.”

Emma snorted. She tried to pick up sawdust with her toes and kept glancing out the window. “What do you know?”

Jake picked up another band of willow and worked it through the loop of the chair arm. “I know Eli. You might want to watch yourself. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You hired him. You’re, like, his only hero.”

Jake looked at her. She was young and in love, but he was halfway dead inside, and he was able to stare her down. “That should be a clue to you about his state of mind.”

“Look, just don’t tell my mom, all right? This has nothing to do with you.”

But it did, that was the trouble. Because even though love was bad for her, even if he could see with his own eyes that it was eating her up, wasting her away to skin and bones, he still sat there filled with envy. Because she, at least, was touching who she loved. She was kissing him until she lost her breath. She was loving him, with no thought whatsoever of the consequences, or all the things she could lose in the end.

“You be careful,” he said.

He saw she had some quick retort, then decided not to speak it. She stood up and walked to the door. She looked over her shoulder at him.

“You know,” she said quietly, “she’s not sleeping either.”

Jake looked up, but she was already gone, a slice of burning white light through the night.

*  *  *

Just before dawn, Maggie heard her granddaughter sneak back into the cabin. The girl crept past Savannah, who slept on a mat in front of the fire with the dogs across her feet, and curled up on the sofa beside her. In seconds, Emma’s breathing went from hysterical to still.

Maggie had heard Emma sneaking out every night to be with that future convict, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop her. If it had been Savannah at the same age, she would have hog-tied her to the bed. She would have served her only bread and water until she came to her senses. But she was getting old. She had to be because she’d started rooting for a teenager. The girl was a maudlin mess, in love out of her mind. Everything but Eli just faded to white, and still Maggie couldn’t stop herself from looking out the window when Emma ran down the road and whispering, “Faster. Faster.”

Now, Maggie curled on her side toward Doug. For the last two weeks, Doug had slept like a well-behaved six-month-old. Twelve hours a night, then another three-hour afternoon nap. He slept without spittle at the corners of his mouth, his breath did not bubble in his lungs, and he smelled, suddenly, clean as soap. She reached out for his cheek, then his hand was on hers. His eyes were wide open.

“Maggie,” he said.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was kissing him. She pressed her body against his, and for the first time in months, it was warm. She hardly noticed the jut of his hip bone. She worked up the nerve to run her hand over his bare scalp, and it was not so bad. It was smooth as a baby’s skin. He kissed her cheeks, her nose, the tears at the corners of her eyes.

“It’s all right, love,” he said. “You see? It’s all right.”

He slipped his hand under her nightgown. He wouldn’t let her touch him, but he moaned when he ran his hand over her breast, as if that was, and always had been, just as good. She didn’t expect him to, so it was that much sweeter when he slipped inside her. It had been so long, she cried out, but he covered her mouth with his. When she finally came, the climax rolled over her body, pulling her up and away from him, but she hadn’t come this far to let that happen. She cut off the pleasure in midstream and clung to him tighter. She swore over and over that she would never let him go.

 T
HIRTEEN
 T
HE
F
IVE OF
C
UPS
, R
EVERSED
R
ETURN OF AN
O
LD
F
RIEND
 

B
en Hiller, president of the MesaLand Homeowners Association, had seen many amazing things in his life—the battle of Iwo Jima, Boy George, Clinton elected not once but twice, but when the gladiolus his wife Helen had planted and watched die fifteen years earlier miraculously began poking through his lawn again, he just stood on his porch in stark disbelief. Helen had watered those flowers every day for a full summer, but they had still turned the color of diseased fruit and fallen over. He had dug up the rotten bulbs himself, thinking they might contaminate the roots of his imported blue fescue, but now there they were, stalks high as kneecaps, flowers the color of hot pink desire.

He just stood and stared and wondered what God was thinking, torturing a man with his dead wife’s favorite flowers or, worse yet, letting him fall in love
with her in the first place, when she was destined to die in her fifties. It was just plain cruel.

Wendy Ginger was the first to notice the blooms. She came out of her house across the street, dressed in her hospital candy-stripes, and asked the young driver from Dial-a-Ride to wait.

“You old romantic,” she said, crossing the street. “What a wonderful tribute to Helen.”

Ben didn’t say a word. He turned sideways before she could spot the tears running down his cheeks, before she could ask herself in for coffee and expect him to think up something to say. The only woman he’d been able to talk to was Helen, and that was because she’d done all the talking; she’d decoded his nods and mumbles into poetry, she’d stunned him with who she thought he was.

The man from Dial-a-Ride honked. “Off to spread some cheer,” Wendy said.

Ben stared at his lawn, a hum building in his throat. He was not much of a talker, but whether he liked it or not, now he had something to say. He was fairly certain he was being haunted. It wasn’t just the gladiolus. In the last month, he’d started seeing Helen everywhere. A dozen times a day, she was walking down the street, kicking off her shoes on someone’s lawn, or standing in their rose garden in a pair of lacy lavender socks. She appeared in the silky heads of butter lettuce in his crisper, as an anchor on the evening news; she had a tendency to poke her head out of his neighbors’ car windows. He’d found himself running out his front door and putting his arms around old Marilee D’Annuncio, until she cried out that he was scaring her. Once he had wandered down his block and clung to a streetlamp, until a nice widow came out of her house in her slippers to take him home.

Deliberately now, he kicked off his own shoes. He
tossed one beneath the rosebush, the other in the center of his perfect lawn. Then he walked barefoot to his car. Everyone knew the way to Jake Grey’s place, but until now, only the young people had had the guts to go there. At first, when he hit the forest road and then the huge drop-offs, he felt a little sick. After he breathed in enough vanilla-scented air, though, he actually drove a little faster. He hadn’t taken a chance with his life in years, and that was ridiculous. Before he’d met Helen, he’d scaled every ten-thousand-foot peak in North America. He had taken his first free-fall skydive at the age of sixteen. He could understand growing more conservative while his children were growing up and Helen needed his steady paycheck, but now, hell, he ought to be jumping off skyscrapers left and right. He ought to be a madman.

He laughed out loud when he went around a blind turn at twenty miles an hour. He tapped the accelerator with his bare foot and picked up rocks from the rubber mat with his toes. It took him forty-five minutes to reach Jake’s cabin, and then the dogs attacked. He sat in his car while the beasts leapt against the passenger door, scratching the deep blue finish of his Buick. Finally, Jake came out of the cabin and called off the dogs. By the time Ben got out, wincing when his bare feet struck gravel, Maggie, Doug, and the fortune-teller were standing on the porch.

Ben took a deep breath and looked at Maggie. “There were some lights on in your garage apartment the last few nights,” he said. “Thought I should tell you.”

Maggie stared at his bare feet. Savannah wrapped her arms around herself, but no one answered. The dogs were getting hysterical again, circling his ankles, taking whiffs of his toes and howling.